General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho here has experience with computer writing programs
I am grading (. . . when am I not grading?) a paper on the War Powers Act. I don't think I have ever seen one like this. I have plenty that have all sorts of inaccuracies and bad writing. Sometimes it takes a second or even a third reading of a passage to understand what the mean. Some are so bad that I require they go to the writing center on campus.
But this paper is a collection of often unrelated words generally relating to the topic. It sounds as if it was written by a computer ... or by a committee
Examples:
I'm confounded.
Help, please
sinkingfeeling
(51,473 posts)ashling
(25,771 posts)I am trying to figure out where this cam from. Do I just give this student a zero, or a zero and a trip to see the dean?
guardian
(2,282 posts)Fail that student.
librechik
(30,676 posts)a translation program which is hilariously non-sequitur-ish
Canuckistanian
(42,290 posts)I mean, who uses such an obscure word as "afore"?
randome
(34,845 posts)That's my guess.
I just don't see someone playing a prank with their grade like this.
It would be a shame to take all the tests, quizzes, etc. and risk getting tossed out of the class for a prank.
hootinholler
(26,449 posts)Then passed through translation to say, French and back again to English?
Any luck when you google a passage? Put it in quotes and the google treats it as a phrase search.
Whatever wrote that doesn't understand English well.
ashling
(25,771 posts)Interestingly enough, I caught my first instance of plagiarism that way back when I was a graduate assistant. A student had cut and paste an article from the National Review. Which prompted me to look back at an earlier paper in which the student had the presence of mind to cut the first and last paragraph.
One of the keys was the fact that one of the pieces included the phrases "last week in these pages I looked at" (or something like that and the final paragraph included "Next week I'll consider ..."
MattBaggins
(7,904 posts)Is that the result of an ESL student using translation software?
denverbill
(11,489 posts)I wonder if they found an article in another language and translated it through Babelfish. But if they are smart enough to find an article in a foreign language, they would be smart enough to proof read the translation.
I wonder if there is a some program that 'unplagiarizes' articles, but replacing some verbs, adjectives, etc with similar words. That's almost what this sounds like to me.
Either way, it's an F.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)(such that it is) on a public board.
That said, this looks like a translator program. Is your student a non-native speaker of English? if so, he or she may have written the paper in his or her native language and sent it through a translation program (a fairly common occurrence).
It could also be just straight up plagiarized through a translation engine.
Third possibility: it is plagiarized with the help of a thesaurus - the student has introduced poor "synonyms" in an attempt to mask the plagiarism.
I can tell you this: it is deeply unlikely that this isn't some form of plagiarism. A student who would know the word "autonomous" wouldn't produce such incoherent prose.
ashling
(25,771 posts)and believe me I did consider your first admonition. I did not post this lightly.
localroger
(3,630 posts)These programs work by analyzing a large sample of real text, and listing what words appear together with what frequency; then random words are chosen and strung together with the same frequencies. The result tends to recognizably mimic the style of the original author, but the actual sentences don't make any sense.
Foolacious
(497 posts)And I do have a bit of experience with this kind of programming.
ashling
(25,771 posts)but I have no real experience with these other that humor line generators (talk like a pirate, etc.)
I also have no real knowledge of the availability of software for this, etc. ...
Crabby Appleton
(5,231 posts)backscatter712
(26,355 posts)Back in '08, some wiseass used one to make a web site where you could "interview" Sarah Palin! Indistinguishable from the real thing!
Sounds like your student failed his Turing Test.
William Seger
(10,779 posts)It doesn't make enough sense to be a translation of anything meaningful -- it's just gibberish.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)Although it sounds more like it was translated poorly from Chinese.
There are places where you can order custom term papers at low rates from Asian writing bullpens, but even they recommend that you edit to suit. This looks like either raw offshore author product, or an Indian up late on a bender while trying to pad out the word and complexity score.
tammywammy
(26,582 posts)There's a ton of websites out there where you can pay someone to write your paper for you. I'd never heard of such a thing until a couple of years ago, there was a post here on DU linking to an article about it.
edited to add: Here's that article http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)...of other languages then back into English.
One of the Philip K. Dick novels discusses this as a misuse of a distributed computer system. The activity is referred to as The Game by its participants. A person is presented with some bizarre phrase or sentence, and is supposed to guess what it was before being garbled by the translation process.
For example "Serious Constrictingpath" could be a result of the name Ernest Hemingway being translated through a series of languages.
Four score and seven years ago
04:20 Et il y a sept ans
04: 20, Og syv år siden
04: 20, ??? ??ώ ??? ???ά ??ό???
04: 20 И семь лет
04: 20, और सात साल
04: 20, and seven years
DrewFlorida
(1,096 posts)Apparently you have Ms. South Carolina in your class, LMAO!
Watch her in action on this youtube link.
ashling
(25,771 posts)randome
(34,845 posts)AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)Of course, it could have been written by a future MBA from another school.
lpbk2713
(42,766 posts)A scanner is used to get the closest recognition of print from an image.
democrat_patriot
(2,774 posts)They input keywords and out pops an article 'written' by a computer.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)You may have a troubled student.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)with drugs (especially smack and speed).
ashling
(25,771 posts)with students as this is online. I have considered that in other cases, but this is just too weird.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)at a local Help Center and saw word salad in action live and in person.
Frightening stuff.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Your school may have responsibilities. Not sure with these new virtual universities.
ashling
(25,771 posts)wandy
(3,539 posts)Anyone smart enough to use a computer for OCR, translation or even in this day and age speech to text, is smart enough to check the output.
TlalocW
(15,391 posts)Maybe?
TlalocW
bbgrunt
(5,281 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)The Postmodernism Generator is a delicious debunking of academic postmodernism, which was taken down by Richard Dawkins in his book, A Devil's Chaplain.
It generates similar word salad. Or, maybe the student is him/herself a postmodernist.
(There is even a Postmodernism Generator App for the iPhone.)
Either way, it seems like word salad and therefore suspicious.
progressoid
(49,999 posts)Or someone trying desperately to sound like intelligent.
longship
(40,416 posts)The OP's student's grammar doesn't parse. So, maybe Babelfish is the answer.
benld74
(9,909 posts)kentuck
(111,110 posts)Subjects, verbs, nouns, adverbs, prepositions.
Simple sentences.
See Spot run. I like cheese. You are a genius. What is a sentence?
It seems like this person has a fairly good vocabulary but doesn't know how to use it?
Ian David
(69,059 posts)Perhaps even a foreigner in a termpaper mill.
Or, it could be a purchased term paper and someone has gone and changed a bunch of words around so that they won't get caught submitting a duplicate of someone else's.
See:
Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers
http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm
Why You Should Not Buy College Term Papers
Fraudulent Custom Paper Sites, Academic Dishonesty, & Other Issues
http://suite101.com/article/why-you-should-not-buy-college-term-papers-a197449
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)That stuff sounded all intellectual and used a lot of buzzwords but the semantic content was precisely zero.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,836 posts)Dalai_1
(1,301 posts)backscatter712
(26,355 posts)immoderate
(20,885 posts)Word salad by a mentally ill person is possible, but unlikely without some spelling errors.
Some years ago, I taught a computer class to middle schoolers. For word processing, they had to write something. For many, they handed in unintelligible papers. So I invited them to read it to me. When they realized they couldn't understand what they had written, they sheepishly took it back to the computer. I said, "Don't hand me anything you haven't read first." It was an awakening.
--imm
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Hell, Word will try to spell check on the fly.
immoderate
(20,885 posts)Spell errors might, in that case, translate to vocabulary errors. Maybe it was a mentally ill person using a writing generator.
--imm
RebelOne
(30,947 posts)It seems like gibberish to me. And I am a former copy editor and would have to rewrite some parts of stories to make sense. I do not even see a way to rewrite these paragraphs to make any sense at all.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)moondust
(20,006 posts)I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation dont have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.
Blanks
(4,835 posts)I've tried talking into the damn things and that's about how close they come to 'guessing' what I'm saying.
Obviously, if that's what happened, they should have proof read it. I've been up all night and turned in some shit (when i was in college) that didn't make sense when I read it later.
Nothing this bad I hope, but some sentences in this seem to start coherently and then taper off into strangeness. Or make sense and then a strange word appears.
I worked at a place where the boss talked into a tape recorder, and the girls typed the letters up from what he had said. The first drafts very often read like this.
ashling
(25,771 posts)sometimes. Takes a while for it to learn my speech and inflections
ladjf
(17,320 posts)program at that.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)Maybe they took some other essay on the War Powers Act and fed it through an article spinner, or something like that.
A computer program than looks up words in the thesaurus and makes substitutions. Generates this kind of gibberish. Used by shady websites do generate lots of content.